Don’t be daunted by the length. His comments on Palin and Climategate, replete with lies about how old the e-mails are, come within the first four minutes. (The Goracle’s never been good with guesstimates.) The left’s been breathing into a paper bag since last night over WaPo’s decision to run her op-ed, but Gore’s response here is comparatively restrained. Instead of grandstanding for his base by calling her a yokel or whatever, he sticks to his argument and declines to attack her personally. Presumably that’s because he’s a bit more politically savvy than his carbon-belching pals at Copenhagen and would rather not make this more of a partisan issue than it already is. Or maybe he simply doesn’t want to alienate someone like Palin who accepts that climate change is happening and even concedes that man may be contributing to it. She could be useful to him eventually in forging a consensus that global warming is real, even if the debate over its chief cause will rage on.

For the moment, however, the message machine is preoccupied with the scandal du jour:

COPENHAGEN — “Climategate” has muddied the good green message that was supposed to come out of the United Nations climate change talks here, forcing leaders to spend time justifying the science behind global warming when they want to focus on ending it…

“I think this is a completely annoying distraction,” added Kim Carstensen, leader of the World Wildlife Fund’s Global Climate Initiative. “It’s very clear that this has been done to discredit climate research. … It’s a bluff. There’s nothing in it; it’s just a huge distraction.”…

“It’s another Internet frenzy thing,” Goldmark told POLITICO Wednesday. “These things get a life, and they reproduce themselves like little bacteria. … Our attitude is, it’s the same old stuff from the same old people, and it doesn’t change the science at all. None of the NGOs pay a lot of attention to it.”

Actually, the most interesting exchange here isn’t the Palin or Climategate, it’s Gore’s palpable disappointment at around 11:45 that The One decided to make ObamaCare the focus of his first year instead of cap and trade. That’s good political sense — health care has been the left’s top domestic priority for ages and it’s always stood a better chance of getting through the Senate than C&T — but like George Will said yesterday, if Earth truly is in the balance then what the hell are they doing putting this off until next year? How much of a crisis can it really be?

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